Ripple Effects of Climate Change

Extra Info for insertion of elements into Blog - don’t delete until the end!

This is an R Markdown document. Markdown is a simple formatting syntax for authoring HTML, PDF, and MS Word documents. For example, you can include Bold and Italic and Code text. For more details on using R Markdown see http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com.

You should test out updating your GitHub Pages website:

  • clone your group’s blog project repo in RStudio
  • update “Your Project Title Here” to a new title in the YAML header
  • knit index.Rmd
  • commit and push BOTH the index.Rmd and the index.html files
  • go to https://stat231-f20.github.io/Blog-HealthAndJusticeLeague to see the published test document (this is publicly available!)

Beyond Global Warming

According to the NASA Earth Observatory, climate change can affect the fuuture prevalence and intensity of various climate disasters. As seen in the plot below, there has been a global temp increase over time (1880-2020). This is partially due to the increase in greenhouse gas emission into the atmosphere.

Unfortunately, subsequent effects of this temperature increase include a higher risk of droughts and possibly floods (since precipitation could fall less frequently, but in a higher amount). Furthermore, the temperature increase worldwide can homogenize the temperatures at the north and south poles, and the equator. The temperature increase will make the poles hotter and more humid, which in fact could reduce the number of storms. But this sounds like a good thing, right?

As land surface temperatures, humidity, and sea surface temperatures increase, there is more water vapor present in the atmosphere, so the intensity of the storms could increase. Furthermore, as is frequently said, rising temperatures are causing glacial melting, which increases the sea levels and thus increases the extent of coastal flooding.

Reference Used: (https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/RisingCost/rising_cost5.php)

## Parsed with column specification:
## cols(
##   period = col_date(format = ""),
##   temp = col_double()
## )
## 
## Listening on http://127.0.0.1:4398
## `geom_smooth()` using method = 'gam' and formula 'y ~ s(x, bs = "cs")'
## Warning: Removed 3 rows containing non-finite values (stat_smooth).
## Warning: Removed 3 row(s) containing missing values (geom_path).

How does this relate to public health? We want to explore the ways in which climate disasters have ripple effects on different societies. In this blog we will focus on 3 different questions:

Research Questions

  1. Are the effects of climate change (specifically air pollution) evident in epidemiological prevalence data or mortality data?

  2. What does the amount of homelessness and displacement due to climate disasters look like and how has that changed over time?

  3. How do climate change ripple effects (measured via infant and maternal mortality) show differently in developing (i.e. more agriculture-based) versus developed countries?

Tab 1: Bella’s part

#PM2.5 leaflets
PM25_1990_leaflet
PM25_2017_leaflet
PM25_change_leaflet
DALY_1990_leaflet
DALY_2017_leaflet
DALY_change_leaflet
animate(g, duration = 20, fps = 20, width = 400, height = 400, renderer = gifski_renderer())

#anim_save("PM2.5 vs. DALY.gif")
gdaly
gexposure

Tab 2: Mythili’s part

## Parsed with column specification:
## cols(
##   COU = col_character(),
##   Country = col_character(),
##   decade = col_double(),
##   avginfmort = col_double(),
##   avmatmort = col_double()
## )
##  [1] 3 3 3 3 3 1 1 3 3 1 3 3 3 3 1 3 3 3 3 3 1 3 2 3 3 3 1 1 1 3 3 3

## Parsed with column specification:
## cols(
##   COU = col_character(),
##   Country = col_character(),
##   decade = col_double(),
##   avginfmort = col_double(),
##   avmatmort = col_double()
## )
##  [1] 2 2 2 2 2 3 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 3 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 3

Tab 3: Lillian’s part

Here, I am investigating how the impacts of natural disasters have changed over time since 1980 until 2020. Specifically, how has the frequency of natural disasters changed? How has the number of people killed, injured, affected, and displaced due to these disasters changed?
To investigate this problem, we obtained a dataset that recorded “impactful” natural disasters for the past 40 years. By “impactful” we mean that these disasters killed, injured, displaced, or affected humans in various ways. Take a look at the shiny app below.

## 
## Listening on http://127.0.0.1:7434